Contact, agency, and haptic experience in sport: a conceptual analysis of embodied skill, interpersonal touch, and digital mediation.

Sport is often analyzed through visual, physiological, or cognitive models, yet athletes also act through pressure, flow, friction, rebound, thermal change, bodily guidance, proximity, and vibration. These phenomena are usually examined separately in research on perceptual skill, coaching and safeguarding, disability access, and haptic technology. This conceptual analysis develops the Contact-Agency Framework to compare how body-environment, body-other, and body-technology contact reorganize opportunities to perceive, interpret, calibrate, regulate, contest, and delegate action-relevant judgment. A structured, purposive synthesis distinguishes tactile sensation, tactile perception, haptic perception, and haptic experience; treats proprioception, kinesthesia, and task-relevant thermoreception as analytically distinct but functionally coupled; and positions interoception, pain, fatigue, and affective touch as adjacent modulators. Environmental haptic information may support skilled calibration when it is detectable, discriminable, and task relevant. Interpersonal touch may guide or constrain depending on relational authorization, power, consent, and contestability. Digital mediation may expand access or displace judgment depending on mediation function, feedback schedule, interface transparency, and user control. Disability sport and Taijiquan push-hands function as analytically demanding boundary cases that expose limits of visually dominant and one-directional accounts. Five propositions specify candidate indicators, measurement designs, expected patterns, boundary conditions, and limitations. The framework is offered as a mid-level analytical heuristic, not a general theory of touch.